BusinessWeek - "This Is Not The Intel We All Know" (excerpt)

BusinessWeek via Yahoo.com (excerpt) ^ | August 6, 2004

[HAL9000]

BusinessWeek excerpt -

[snip]

Why is Intel overpromising and underdelivering? The problems stem from mistakes made five years ago in the design of its Pentium chip. Execs misjudged, believing PC makers and consumers would continue to embrace ever faster, power-hungry chips. Now the latest iterations are ill-suited to today's corporate desktops, as well as the new multimedia home PCs that are the focus of a major Intel push this year. Intel says the problems are only temporary. "We continue to expect to exit the year with the vast majority of our desktop and notebook processors on the (new) technology," says spokesman Robert Manetta.

[snip]

Intel's plan faces delays because the current Pentium desktop chip design is outdated -- and, in fact, poorly suited for consumer electronics. One big problem, say PC makers: The latest version of the Pentium 4 draws too much power and therefore produces too much heat. Until it can fix the heat problem, PC makers can't install the chips in their machines.

[snip]

[HAL9000]

Intel's little-endian CISC architecture is Stuck in the Seventies. They clearly have the technical capability to deliver a much better design, but unfortunately, they have no plans to do so.

[GSlob]

Well, Apple bit the bullet and has its G5s liquid cooled. Does Intel?

[Boundless]

The BW article contains no new info on Intel's
present situation (and omits several problems),
but does state:

"Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE:AMD - News) has
gained ground in consumer PC chips, winning about
50% of desktop PC sales, according to researcher
Current Analysis."

That's fairly significant, if true.

[lelio]

Well, Apple bit the bullet and has its G5s liquid cooled. Does Intel?

That's not a question to ask Intel, its a question to ask the computer sellers. Although Intel could push watercooling to make it more mainstream.

Are Apple's laptops watercooled?

[Ken522]

... significant and true - AMD processors are less expensive than comparable Intel products.

[GSlob]

There are no Apple G5 notebooks as yet. Only G4s. And only the most recent 2x2.5GHz G5 is, I believe, liquid cooled.

[COEXERJ145]

Well, Apple bit the bullet and has its G5s liquid cooled. Does Intel?

You can buy computers that use Intel chips and liquid cooling but they cost more.

[The Duke]

As soon as the prevalent operating system abstracts itself above the hardware layer Intel is going to have problems.

[Dont Mention the War]

Are Apple's laptops watercooled?

Not yet. But I bet it won't be long.

[fooman]

I hope so. I own AMD...

[HAL9000]

Well, Apple bit the bullet and has its G5s liquid cooled. Does Intel?

Good question. According to Google, there are several liquid cooling solutions available for Intel processors.

I think the latest G5s could have used big fans and heat sinks instead of liquid cooling, but it would be too noisy for Apple. In contrast, most Pentium users apparently don't care about how loud their computer is, or how much heat it generates, so they will probably continue with the wind tunnel cooling method.

[eno_]

As soon as the prevalent operating system abstracts itself above the hardware layer Intel is going to have problems.

The NT kernel and most of XP are very portable. QA would be a collosal task, and then you would have to convince ISVs to compile their apps for a new instruction set.

Of course, open source software is commonly compiled as prt of the installation process. This is just one example of how closed-source products face an assymetric competitive situation.

[snopercod]

I'm running a Pentium 4 in this Dell Dimension 8250, and whenever I do a computation-intensive operation in AutoCAD, I can hear the cooling fan slow down a bit. LOL!

[gitmo]

The new security features of WinXP-SP2 don't work on Intel machines. They do work on the AMD processors being produced.

[oceanview]

its Microsoft that is hurting Intel - they have zero software innovation in their products, so who needs faster processors for desktops? so that friggin paper clip assistant can move around faster?

[upchuck]

The new security features of WinXP-SP2 don't work on Intel machines. They do work on the AMD processors being produced.

Wow! That's really something. Do you have something more specific? Like a link perhaps? I've been all over the MSFT website and can't find this info anywhere.

[chilepepper]

yeah, but the itanium has been a dud precisely because it tried to "escape" the old seventies architecture. AMD got a leg up because they realized that software is what is most important with a computer. the hardware merely has to be adequate -- the reason AMD, transmeta, Cyrix and other players have been able to nibble away at the edges of Intels monopoly -- they run the same software adequately well.

by the way, don't count Intel out too quickly. Remember when the first Athlons beat up on the Pentium III chips? overnight, out of nowhere Intel started shipping PIII cpus that matched the Athlon's performance.

An faint echo of this move has just occured with Intel quietly shipping Xeons with 64 bit extensions. This sleeper could be Intel's answer to the Operteron/AMD64 (time will tell). It was not announced by Intel, rather just started to crop up in some servers offered by IBM...

[gitmo]

Wow! That's really something. Do you have something more specific? Like a link perhaps? I've been all over the MSFT website and can't find this info anywhere.

I saw this in ZDNet: David Berlind's article entitled Critical XP SP2 Alert: Cancel all non-AMD system buys. They don't allow us to copy their articles on FR, but one sentence in the article is:

Unfortunately, except for users with systems based on AMD’s Athlon 64, Sempron (mobile), or Opteron microprocessors (a very tiny percentage of the more than 200 million users of Windows XP), almost no one can take advantage of this important technology.

The "inportant technology" he refers to is Data Execution Prevention (DEP). DEP sets overflow memory off limits for executeables. This prevents many worms and trojans from executing.

[upchuck]

Thanks for the ZDnet link gitmo. Now I know why I couldn't find this om MSFT's website :)

[pacelvi]

Here is a link to MS' site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/security/productinfo/XPSP2/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnwxp/html/securityinxpsp2.asp

Just scroll a little bit down to section for Memory Protection. The security feature is called NX (No-Execute). This tells a CPU that a declare Memory range in RAM is data-only, so that if a hacker tries to do a buffer overflow, the CPU will be prevented from running that code as executable.

It is only a tiny fraction of what SP2 brings to XP, and is the only feature which is CPU-make specific.